EX-SS MAN QUITS U.S. FOR AUSTRIA

AP

Published: May 30, 1987

WASHINGTON, May 29—
A 60-year-old Rumanian native who hid his past as a Nazi SS guard at a death camp left the country before being stripped of his United States citizenship, the Justice Department announced today.

The former guard, Martin Bartesch, flew to Austria on Wednesday, and his son said he planned to settle there. Mr. Bartesch, who became a naturalized American in 1966, was stripped of his citizenship today and faced a deportation hearing June 16.

In court papers made public today, Mr. Bartesch admitted that he had voluntarily enlisted in 1943 in the Death's Head Battalion, the SS unit that ran the Mauthausen camp system in Austria. Tens of thousands of prisoners died at Mauthausen in shootings, gassings, hangings and as the result of starvation and forced labor. Said He Lied in 1955

Mr. Bartesch also acknowledged that he lied when he came to the United States in 1955 by telling the authorities that he had served in a different SS division.

The statements were part of an accord unsealed today in Federal District Court in Chicago, under which Mr. Bartesch agreed to leave the United States permanently. He worked as a janitor in a Chicago apartment building.

One piece of evidence gathered against Mr. Bartesch by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations was the Mauthausen ''Unnatural Death Book,'' a log kept from October 1942 to April 1945 of prisoner deaths.

Entry No. 300 shows that on Oct. 20, 1943, a French Jew named Max Ochshorn was shot to death at the main camp of Mauthausen by Pvt. Martin Bartesch of the SS, who was then 17.

Mr. Bartesch's wife, Anna, accompanied him to Austria, according to his son Heinz. The couple left behind a son, a daughter and five grandchildren in Chicago.

The son said his father had served as a work-crew guard at a Mauthausen camp when he was 18 but was never a guard at the main death camp. He said his father ''was adamant he never did anything wrong.''

Mr. Bartesch is the 15th person, and the third Mauthausen guard, to leave the United States as a result of activities by the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit.